Cell phones and other user equipment are increasingly including near field communication (NFC) circuits that can be used to communicate with external NFC circuits. Users can now operate user equipment to provide credit/debit account information to retail point-of-sale terminals, read data from NFC tags on items, determine the presence and absence of NFC tagged items, and perform other desirable operations. Unfortunately, with the tremendous proliferation of NFC circuits there are also increasing opportunities for time overlapping collisions to occur between the transmissions of nearby NFC circuits that can interfere with or prevent a user equipment from carrying out communications with a targeted NFC circuit.